When Laurel Touby set up a website for freelance journalists like herself she made a classic mistake. After five years of organizing parties for New York writers, last summer she decided that a community site listing jobs and apartments might be not only useful, but lucrative.

With her inner entrepreneur on fire she surfed over to Network Solutions and registered the domain name hireminds.com (geddit?), and just to be certain, higherminds.com too, pointing the latter to the former. Then she told all her contacts to spread the word about “Hire Minds” and sat back to watch her traffic boom.

Her mistake was in not thinking to register the trademark, “hire minds.” Up the road in Boston, one David Hayes was setting up his own website, this one listing jobs in high tech (left brain and right brain), which he called hire-minds.com. Mr Hayes had the good sense to check to see if the trademark “hire minds” was available, and seeing it was, jumped at the chance to register it.

Call the lawyers.

The problem is, Hayes in Boston may be able legally to keep Touby from continuing to use her site due to potential confusion among web surfers. Although hers effectively has two names – “higherminds” and “hireminds” – she knows from server records that “99.9 percent” of people arrive at her site by typing in “hireminds.” In any case, since trademarks are a fuzzier category than domain names, two words that sound the same can be covered by one trademark. She might have to change the name of her site to something completely different.

“This is increasingly common,” says John Flock, a partner with Kenyon & Kenyon, a leading law firm specializing in intellectual property issues. Flock, who is not handling Touby’s case, added, “It will remain so until people realize that creating a domain name is not like picking an e-mail address. You have to treat a domain like a business, and that means doing a trademark search. It only costs $245 to register one once it’s available. Plus lawyers’ fees.”

He stresses that the winner in a trademark dispute is often the person who has been using the name for commercial purposes longer. Hanging on to a domain name, as cybersquatters do, in the hope of selling it to someone more desperate one day, does not constitute interstate commerce.

If Touby and Hayes go to court, they will have to show which of them put up their website first. Touby is confident.

You can search out trademarks for free on the web at http://trademarks.uspto.gov. There you’ll find that Laurel Touby is not the only one vulnerable. There are plenty of conceptual domain names that have been registered but not trademarked, such as “higher thought” and “higher authority.” When you consider that in this financial climate a successful website can be sold down the line to an omnivorous corporation for six or seven figures, it’s worth covering your assets.

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Speaking of cybersquatters, you can have some fun at their expense. Using the contact information freely avaible at Network Solutions, send the squatter an e-mail expressing an interest in buying one of their domains. They’ll usually shoot right back and ask for a ludicrous sum. Once you have them hooked, start haggling. Invite a friend, and get an auction going. Then at the last minute, pull out.

I call it eBunking. Hey, there’s a word. Maybe I should register it? *Please send e-mail to